Seb Lee-Delisle

3D engine in 10 lines*

Seb Lee-Delisle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:03:55 +0000

During my session at the Flash Gaming Summit, I showed a very simple 3D particle renderer to attempt to demystify the process of converting 3D into 2D.

Click and drag.

The actual code that converts from 3D to 2D is easy! First you have to figure out how much you have to resize things depending on how far away they are. (ie what their z position is).

newscale = f/(f+z);

Where f is a notional field of view. Changing this will change how wide the (virtual) camera is. A good starting point would be 250. Then you multiply the 3D x and y positions by the newscale to get their 2D x and y positions.

x2d = x3d * newscale; 
y2d = y3d * newscale;

So that’s where we put our particle, in this case represented by a MovieClip that we also need to resize by our new scale :

clip.scaleX = clip.scaleY = newscale;

And then the final thing we need to do is sort by the z position so that particles in front appear above particles in the background.

particles.sortOn("z", Array.DESCENDING | Array.NUMERIC); 
for(var i:int = 0; i< particles.length;i++)
{
	particle = particles[i];
	particleClip.setChildIndex(particle.clip, i); 
}

There’s some other stuff in there too, to create the depth of field blur and also the bitmap trails, but have a look and see what you can do with it.

Download the source code for simple 3D engine.

* I haven’t actually counted the number of lines. I’m guessing it’s about 10.

Learning to love learning

Seb Lee-Delisle — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:59:33 +0000

I’ve just published a blog post on the FITC blog where I explain what inspires me and how to learn to love the constant demand of changing technology.

http://blog.fitc.ca/post.cfm/stagnating-in-your-cubicle-learn-to-love-to-learn

Actionscript Hero interview

Seb Lee-Delisle — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:46:28 +0000

It was great to catch up with Pablo and the ActionScriptHero crew in Amsterdam, and we had a good chat about the future of Flash, the exciting changes in digital and what inspires me.

FITC Amsterdam 2010 – Seb Lee-Delisle Interview Part 1/2 from ActionScriptHero.org on Vimeo.

FITC Amsterdam 2010 – Seb Lee-Delisle Interview Part 2/2 from ActionScriptHero.org on Vimeo.

A (belated) review of 2009

Seb Lee-Delisle — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:55:43 +0000

Yes, I know; I’m late with my review of last year. Everyone else did theirs in December, or at least January. But you know, I’ve done one every year and the OCD element in my personality just won’t let me get away with it. So allow me this minor self-indulgence just once a year (especially today of all days )

And actually 2009 was a very extreme year, some moments of difficulty and some moments of joy! So let’s start at the beginning…

A major part of 2009 was Big and Small, perhaps the most important Plug-in Media project so far. We were still working hard in January and we were delighted in February to get confirmation that the BBC wanted phase two, which added the garden and woods. And honestly, with the economy as it was in the first half of the year, we were very glad to have a huge project like that to get our teeth into.

But I still found time to play with FLARToolkit a little more, with my wormhole in January, I still need to post a full description of how I did it – anyone still interested in this?

February brought a few speaking engagements, first FlashCamp London, FITC Amsterdam, and a sell out PV3D training course in Brighton, all thoroughly enjoyable!

Major news on a personal front for March- I married Jenny. Followed by an awesome honeymoon in Thailand. And I learned to tap dance, perhaps I’ll get around to editing the wedding videos to prove it…

I really enjoyed April’s 5K app competition with my 3D lunar lander. Perhaps the most fun I’ve had making a game for ages! I learned an important lesson about personal projects – to make sure I can complete them in the time I have! It only took a day or so to finish, and it’s mostly because the idea and the execution was so simple; it didn’t have any complex graphics, just simple lines.

Just in time for the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 I released a special edition and spawned a raft of comments arguing about whether man really landed on the moon. But let’s not start all that again!

May brought chaos with an unscheduled office move. Our old landlords had majorly screwed up by not paying any electricity bills for a couple of years. The first we knew about it was when a bailiff turned up with a massive pair of wire cutters. Thankfully, TheWerks in Hove bailed us out and we decamped over there for a few months.

A quick trip off to FlashBelt in June and the inspiration for IWillPayYourParkingTicket.com. This project is currently on hold, pending some further work, I’ll let you know what happens with it. FlashBelt is a brilliant conference and I was so inspired; I’d seriously recommend it if you can get to Minneapolis.

In August we finished our first game for Boomerang TV – Staraoke Stage Fright. It’s realtime rendered in Papervision3D complete with reflections!

I started playing with 3D in HTML5, just in time to do a presentation at Barcamp in Brighton early September about it. Barcamp was the perfect opportunity to get to know some of my Brighton contemporaries a little better. Brighton is swarming with brilliant digital minds, but perhaps I’ll do a separate post about that later

September also brought the crazy carnival to Brighton that is : Flash on the Beach! It keeps getting better and better every year. I love that I get to welcome all my very favourite speakers and friends to Brighton every year for what is now an epic unmissable conference.

We also finished working on a 4 level platform game for long running BBC kids’ show Blue Peter, Turkish Bizarre. It was a real joy to get back to some old-school platform game development with Dom and the team! And we got our Blue Peter badges too.

In October I started out an epic USA trip, starting with Adobe MAX as part of the EuroMaxInvasion. It was the first time I’d ever experienced a corporate conference of this scale, and I was uncomfortable with much of the business posturing I encountered.

The people that inspire me that I love to see on the circuit are not business people, and this conference is a million miles away from the cosy community events that I love. My ambivalence for the event clearly came across in the tone of one of my blog posts and caused a minor furore (later named seb-gate by Phillip Kerman hehe). The lesson I learned there was to make sure that my writing accurately represented my personality.

And there were many positive things about the conference, I got to meet Rachel Luxemburg and John Koch from the Adobe community team who are genuinely passionate about their involvement with the user groups. We were also nominated for a MAX award, that our friends at MLB.com won and they snuck me back-stage for a meet and greet with Luke Skywalker. But I sadly failed to wrestle the award from the vice-like grip of Thaniya from MLB.

Any anxiety about seb-gate quickly subsided as I continued on my trip! First spending a few days in LA with the awesome Influxis, and then moving on to San Francisco where I was very pleased to meet up with friends and a trip to the YouTube offices courtesy of my friend Geoff Stearns. It was a crazy time in San Francisco, also squeezing in meetings with Robert Hodgin, Odopod and hacker-space NoiseBridge.

And then on to Pittsburg for FlashPitt. Awesome! And I even got to see my first ever ice hockey game with Jer Thorpe, Julian Dolce, Val Head (the conference organiser) and her husband Jason.

The final leg of my trip was in NYC where I met ParkingTicket winner Jennifer and paid her ticket, taught a sold-out one day workshop, and was then struck by what I now have decided to call swine flu It was so frustrating to be in New York and yet be bed-ridden. Hmmm.

Then I realeased a simple Flash 3D drawing API, more as an experiment in an interface to drawing 3D shapes than anything else. If you like it, or have suggestions, let me know. I could integrate a system like this into Papervision3D.

November was crazy.

Accolades had been building for Big and Small, we’d been nominated for many awards: .net, FITC, and MAX but we didn’t win any of them. In fact we’d never won any award we’d been nominated for! So it was quite a shock and of course an absolute delight to win the BAFTA. We’d all worked so hard on the project that it was an emotional moment. Not only is it a great honour to have all of our hard work recognised with such a prestigious award, but it’s also been a massive boost to our business at Plug-in Media.

The company is going from strength to strength, new staff, bigger offices and we’re taking advance bookings for the first time ever. (And we’re hiring – send me your CV!) We’re also near finishing another Papervision3D project (even bigger than Big and Small!), and 5 more for the BBC. But we’re also working for Turner Broadcasting and others. Watch this space for announcements as soon as we can talk about them.

And in December things didn’t let up either.

A venting of my frustrations about the FlashPlayer settings panel hosted on macromedia.com led to a mini campaign to get this sorted. The feature request rocketed into the top ten issues on the FlashPlayer bug tracker and is now “under investigation”. Yay! But I have to admit, it’s made me realise that I should probably have a could deeper look at Jira as I’m sure there are other more important things that need to be fixed…

I spent some time pondering my previous existence as a semi-failed rock star and told my story at the £5App Christmas special. And also stretched some of my musical muscles again by recording a Christmas song with Jenny. Aw.

FlashBrighton

Another massive part of my life that gets hardly mentioned here is FlashBrighton, the local Flash user group that meets every week. We have a fantastic management team, and particular kudos to Richard Willis who imaginative descriptions for every meeting are getting increasingly inspired. In 2009 we covered Flash Games with Iain Lobb, Processing.js with Brendan Dawes, Bug fixing with Niqui Merret, and much, much more!

And we’ve now started streaming our sessions every week at live.flashbrighton.org thanks again to Influxis. Tune in every Tuesday around 7.30 GMT to join us.

So what’s new for 2010?

So far it’s been brilliant. (Hence the belated nature of this post!) My position at Plug-in Media has changed to be less focussed on production and concentrate more on R&D, training and consultancy. I’m massively excited about what’s happening this year, I’m booked to speak at many conferences, FITC Amsterdam, Flash Games Summit, FFK Cologne, FMX Stuttgart, FATC New York, FlashBelt Minneapolis and Flash At the Lake in Zurich for starters! I’m also very excited about my training courses, and I’m even recording a video series for Lynda.com in April.

I have a huge list of technology that I want to learn, having already started with ElectroServer and Unity3D (insanely brilliant) and moving down my list with iPhone development and OpenFrameworks.

This is truly an exciting time in the field of digital creativity and I’m so pleased to be a part of this community. I feel incredibly excited about what this year will bring and I hope that you continue to enjoy my sharing of these experiences. Here’s to 2010!

FlashPlayer 10.1 coolness

Seb Lee-Delisle — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:58:57 +0000

I just got back from a crazy fleeting visit to Amsterdam for FITC, and now the dust is settling, I wanted to talk about some cool new features in FlashPlayer 10.1, especially now that FlashPlayer 10.1 Beta 3 has just been released on Adobe Labs!

RTMFP – Peer-to-peer networking

Yes it’s quite catchy name I know, and this stuff was introduced into the FlashPlayer at version 10, but I haven’t actually seen much use of it as yet. One of its limitations of it was that if you wanted to broadcast to multiple users your FlashPlayer would have to deliver that content to every single connected user. Which needs a lot of bandwidth!

But the new 10.1 introduces some really clever new technology that spreads the load across different users. So you can broadcast your video to one person and their FlashPlayer will then pass that stream on to other connected users nearby. It’s kinda like BitTorrent except it’s all in the browser.

This is a really exciting area for video broadcasting although I hear that on initial video tests it’s a little fragile – probably due to the fact that it’s based on the lossy UDP protocol. But its real strength should be in multiplayer gaming – I hear from my friends at Influxis that latency times are reduced by 50-75%. So this is an area I’ll be doing some research into that’s for sure!

Microphone access – finally!

This is something that caught me out a couple of years ago when we were creating a sound to vision system at FlashBrighton. We got some cool effects working with MP3 files, but then we realised we couldn’t actually use these at gigs as we couldn’t process the audio coming into the microphone/line input.

I was delighted to get the email notification yesterday that this feature request on Adobe’s Jira bug reporting system has now been completed! Excellent news, it means that we can now create some fun audio triggered games. This is important for the type of kids’ projects that we work on at Plug-in Media.

Flash 10.1 for Devices

This is hot news and I have to admit to being sceptical at first, as my luke-warm reports from MAX demonstrate. But no matter what you think about Flash on mobiles, you have to admit that FlashPlayer on Nexus One is an impressive engineering feat. The combination of a 1Ghz processor combined with a complete rewrite from the player engineers has brought the a fully functioning FlashPlayer on to a device for the first time.

Now clearly it has its limitations, I’ve tested the Plug-in Media site on it, and it runs at about 4 frames a second, and it also skips frames – a new way that the mobile FlashPlayer saves processor time. I’ve also tested LunarLander3D on it, which also runs at 4 frames per second. To be fair though, these are both processor heavy projects pushing Flash in the browser to the limits.

Testing LunarLander3D revealed another interesting issue – you can’t control this game at all as it is keyboard controlled. And you only get the keyboard entry pop-up if you click on a text field. So pretty much all key controlled flash games are gonna have to be rewritten if you wanna be able to play them on devices!

But this is very early days, and an excellent first step; the fact that a full FlashPlayer is running on these very limited platforms is very impressive. I think it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens over the next few months.

(If you’re interested in Flash on Devices you should definitely read Thibault’s white paper on the subject).

So exciting times for the Flash Platform, and these are the areas that caught my attention, but which new features of FlashPlayer10.1 excite you! There’s a full list here.

Seamlessly looping video in Flash

Changing the default app to open a .swf on OSX

Seb Lee-Delisle — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:44:46 +0000

This has been a massive problem to me lately, particularly with distributing files on my training courses. For some reason, the swf files that I give my attendees don’t open with the stand alone FlashPlayer, instead they often default to Flash CS4 etc.

I know the usual way to do this is by right clicking and selecting “Info” (or cmd-i) and then setting the app to open this file and then “Change All”. But for some reason, with swfs this doesn’t seem to work and it just reverts back to CS4 or whatever it was before.

This was driving me mental.

But I’ve found a fix – RCDefaultApp

This is a preferences pain that allows you to choose the app for a given file extension.

This seemed to fix it for me but I’d love to know why this happens and how you’ve solved it on your machine, particularly for Windows. And you’ll save me a lot of trouble in my upcoming training courses!

Deleting .svn files on OSX

Seb Lee-Delisle — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:29:35 +0000

Go to the terminal, navigate to the folder you want to delete files from and type :

find . -name "*.svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;

This should delete all .svn folders in the current directory and recurse down into sub-folders too. Please be careful with this!

I also found this handy AppleScript which will toggle hidden files on the mac:
ToggleHiddenFiles

Thanks to Niqui Merret and Raymond De Vries for helping with this.

More training courses in Cologne, Minneapolis, New York and San Francisco

Seb Lee-Delisle — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:07:31 +0000

I’ve just finished my Brighton training courses which were seriously good fun, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, I’ve certainly got excellent feedback so far!

My next training course is short notice; it’ll be a Papervision course in San Francisco on the 9th March particularly aimed at 3D games. It’ll coincide with the Flash games summit so if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll make sure to get in touch with more information as I have it.

Then it’s on to Cologne for FFK in April, where I’m running both a Papervision3D course and a Flash games training course! More info on the FFK website.

And back to NYC for Flash and the City in May, and I’ll be running courses around the conference. Again, mail me if you’re interested and I’ll send you the details as they are announced.

And finally in FlashBelt in June, I’ll be teaching a one day Flash games workshop. Teaching you maths by stealth – who knew that you could learn trigonometry from Asteroids and vector maths from platform games? It’s a fantastic conference and I’m really looking forward to coming back for my fourth year in a row!

Can’t make any of these events? Then help me organise one near you! Mail me.

Can’t spell my name? Use seb.ly

Seb Lee-Delisle — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:54:50 +0000

I often get complaints about my domain name. Is it that hard to spell my surname? I guess it’s a bit of a strange one.

People seem to think that my first name is Seb-Lee but it’s not; Seb is my first name and Lee-Delisle is my surname.

But seeing as people seem to call me Seb-Lee (and close friends even sometimes call me Sebly), I’ve now registered the domain seb.ly and it’s set up to point here! It’s a full redirection service, so think of it as a short URL.

And hopefully that’ll help with the typing…

No related posts.

Giving ElectroServer more memory

Seb Lee-Delisle — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:56:37 +0000

So after last time, I thought I’d given ElectroServer more memory, but it turns out I hadn’t. I’m not exactly sure why, but I suspect it’s something about how Media Temple is set up.

So rather than call the main ElectroServer app (which is just a shell script), I’m opening the ElectroServer jar file, and that way I can tell java how much memory to use (and other options) as parameters.

I’m pretty sure Java is installed somewhere on Media Temple (you need to install the dev tools) but I couldn’t find it anywhere! And if I just typed java it couldn’t find it. I even ran a find command, but it was nowhere! But then I realised that the Java runtime is packaged with ElectroServer in the jre folder!

~~So with a bit of fiddling I worked out that I could start ElectroServer with more memory by running the jar file, but I had to do it while in the server subfolder within the ES install.~~

../jre/bin/java -Xmx128M -jar lib/ElectroServer4-bootstrap.jar -mode StandAlone -config config/ES4Configuration.xml

~~where 128M is the amount of RAM made available.~~

[UPDATE]

There is a better way! Thanks to Paul Hayes (a colleague at Plug-in Media, see comments below) I have now realised that ElectroServer’s main app is nothing more than a shell script that you can edit. Furthermore there is a line you can uncomment right at the top to change the Java parameters :

# Uncomment the following line to add additional VM parameters
# INSTALL4J_ADD_VM_PARAMS=

Change this to :

# Uncomment the following line to add additional VM parameters
INSTALL4J_ADD_VM_PARAMS="-Xmx512m"

Where 512 is the amount of RAM in Mb you want ElectroServer to use.